Testbaudson

This book stems from a collaboration of various authors affiliated with the Smashing Magazine. It's about best practices in modern web design, covering the following topics: CSS Layouts, User Interface Design, Typography, Usability Principles, Color Theory, Performance Optimization, Increasing Conversion Rates and finally Branding.

The book is a quick read, although it covers more than 200 pages. It's especially efficient if you are new to a topic, but even if you're quite knowledgable in a field, it still has interesting facts. For example, I'm pretty much a CSS agnostic, and the first chapter helped to get a good idea of the several approaches there are (fixed width design, fluid design etc), while the chapter on performance optimization was more or less old news to me, but still lead me to two great tools, Yahoo SmushIt for lossless image optimization and Google PageSpeed for CSS and JS optimization (similar to YSlow).

I was hoping to get some inspiration for designing Mapbender applications, but especially the latter chapters made me think more about the Mapbender project website: we really need to change it A LOT. Maybe the wiki should not be the front page, maybe the core information should be in a CMS like Drupal, with thoughfully assembled high-quality content targeted at specific user profiles, especially potential new users. I think the Mapbender project website is not very helpful at the moment, unless you know how to use it.

What I didn't like about the book is its binding: The margins are very narrow, so you have to bend the book real hard in order to read everything close to the binding. I fear that the pages will start coming loose soon. Apart from this, it's a very recommendable book for a general overview. Maybe I was hoping for more hands on CSS, if you have a book on this, please recommend it to me.

Another thing I found interesting was that shipping to Germany was free, but you could opt in to social shipping to make sure that delivery is affordable to people ordering from remote areas of the globe.

The objective was to split a line into segments with another line. Here's what I came up with, the first argument being the source line, the second the line used for cutting the first

SELECT astext(geom) FROM dump ((
SELECT ST_AsText(ST_FORCE_COLLECTION(ST_Difference(
'LINESTRING (5 5, 3 3, 2 2, 0 0 )'::geometry,
'LINESTRING ( 2 0, 0 2 )'::geometry
)))
))

The result is a set of linestrings.

LINESTRING(5 5,3 3,2 2,1 1)
LINESTRING(1 1,0 0)

Absolutely trivial, but maybe you can use it.

Sometimes people ask why my nick is Testbaudson. Here's the story. It's quite stupid but what the hell.

A few years back we were working on a geospatial cemetary application. We needed some mock data for plots in that cemetary, so my collegue Astrid created some plots with fictional names for the dead, like Testmüller or Testmeier, common german names with the prefix "Test". From then on I used Testbaudson as my nick. Maybe the application was so painful to work with, and death had lost its sting.

On the one hand I found the nickname very funny. I imagined how that mock data could end up in the real application, and suddenly you would have an actual funeral for Testmüller, like in the Seinfeld episode "The Susie".

On the other hand, it reminds me of death, which will occur to me one day, no matter what. For me it's important to deal with it, as it puts things into perspective: If life as a resource would be endless, it would have no value. But with death, it suddenly becomes valuable. And with death possibly being just around the corner, even more so. It's good to be reminded of that value.

Furthermore it's also an interesting stylistic device for the story of Testbaudson, just like in Billy Wilder's "Sunset Boulevard", which starts with the protagonist found dead, and the whole film being a flashback.

So while the idea behind the nickname might seem morbid to you, it actually has a positive, life-affirming meaning to me.

Maybe you have read my rant on Twitter a few weeks ago. The feeble weed that I am, I have finally registered. I'm another victim of information distribution fascism. I don't want to be left behind. Or was it the rerun of Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" that made me change my mind?

Anyway, I did a very basic setup, just feeding my existing RSS tubes into Twitter via Twitterfeed. By this, new blog entries and new photos go directly into the bird's nest. By this, I avoid to twitter manually, but I guess it will only be a matter of time until I'm doing that as well. Run, rats, run.

I also created a Twitter account for Mapbender, if anyone cares. I also redirected its blog to Twitter.

Now if only someone could explain to me how geotagging works.

Due to global warming my inner clock urged me to start spring cleaning in December. I found a lot of stuff I wasn't aware of. For example, we found a whole flock of extension cords nesting in the basement.

Here are a two hints for citizens of Bonn thinking about spring cleaning.

You can put electronic waste or CDs into the red bins. There's one in the Stadthaus and one in the Stadtbibliothek.

Someone could be interested in stuff you longer need. Use the Verschenkmarkt. That's the best way to get rid of things. People might just need what you're about to throw away.

Even better than recycling is to not accumulate so much stuff. An easy and trivial way is to stop your mailbox to overflow from ads. A few months ago I created a simple sign that says "no ads please".



It's amazing, it really works. On second thought I should have chosen a more positive wording. But feel free to use it anyway.

Heraclitus was an enigmatic greek philosopher, one of the presocratics. He is best remembered for aphorisms like "You can't step twice into the same river". He argues that by the second time you step in, water has flowed and thus, it's not the same river anymore. At his time, this meant a completely different approach to philosophy, as he eliminated "Being" and replaced it by "Becoming". In his view, everything was in flux, time is not something to be measured in discrete units, there is no "now" and "then", just the flow of becoming.

The consequence is a wicked form of reasoning. If everything is flowing, things cannot be described absolutely. By the moment you have come up with a definition, things have changed. By this the only valid description is one which contradicts itself. A simple example is given in his aphorism "the way up and the way down are the same". A single thing can be described by two opposites. There is no right or wrong, as right is wrong and wrong is right at the same time. This really takes the sting out of any argument.

So much for my naive introduction to Heraclitus. Now take a look at the web. It is the tool that allows us to accelerate in the memetic rat race. As we go faster and faster, we lose the sensation of now, and experience a true form of flow. Heraclitus would have loved it. Imagine he told a carpenter 2500 years back "You are a carpenter and you are not a carpenter". He would have thought Heraclitus was insane. He was just carpenting the way his fathers and grandfathers carpentered. But I can really relate to the sentence "I am a web developer and I am not a web developer". New tools emerge, new skills are required, "the only thing permanent is change".

I have already described the downside of going faster and faster in the memetic rat race. But it's not the web's fault. The web suddenly feels organic.

Let's take a look at an elaboration of the river quote, "We both step and do not step in the same rivers". So how do we do step twice into the same river? This is where language comes in. Humans have come up with conventions of identifying things. We label things. So now a river is no longer a flowing substance, but for example the Rhine river. I can step into the Rhine river twice, although the actual water molecules have changed. This is the power of language.

Language was a big step for humans. Suddenly we were able to build and spread knowledge, and even describe complex issues permanently. What a meme-fest! They could spread faster and mutate, and by this, make our brains grow in size. But let's remember that we also cannot step into the same river twice: We now sense this is a contradictive statement, which shows that language is very limited in describing the world as it is. Permanence is an illusion induced by language. In other words, permanence is nothing but a powerful meme-plex that shapes the way we view the world. There is no "now" or "then" in reality. Language limits us, it limits the way our brains operate. It's like trying to travel at lightspeed in a Volkswagen.

This might be the reason why we are losing out in the memetic rat race. Our language is insufficient. Our brains have adapted to our language. Maybe the web is something that has the potential to capture reality much better than language. But it still relies too much on language. Maybe if its interfaces evolve and become less restrictive, our brains can manage to adapt and do not overload.

But even today, we have potentially great user interfaces. Take geospatial software, maps are already quite intuitive. You can't accurately describe a map, even with thousands of words. A map allows us to process information much faster. We need interfaces like maps in order to keep up. By this I hope we can manage to model the Volkswagen into a spaceship.

There's nothing wrong with Twitter itself, its users or its providers. What is my problem with this phenomenon? Why am I such a curmudgeon? Without a doubt, there is a lot of hype around Twitter. A hype is nothing but a meme pandemic. It's easy to get infected with Twitter these days, maybe it is a mutation of bird flu. Let's take a closer look.

The term for a 140 character text message in Twitter is "tweet". Memes love tweets. The barrier to twitter is low, because a tweet consists only of a few words. We don't talk about the content here, remember that memes are oblivious about what they transport. So the cost is low. What about the effect of a tweet? You immediately reach a huge audience, at least all people who follow your channel, potentially more. Memes love to spread as wide as possible. This is why Twitter is so successful, it guarantees to spread information wide and fast. The ratio of recipients by cost is tremendous. It's just another gear shift in the memetic rat race.

So Twitter is very helpful in efficiently spreading memes. How about the long term consequences? A tweet is just a line of text, it's hard to put complex information in a tweet. It's all about speed. Condense the information to a few words and off you go. Twitter lowers my attention span. It fucks with my brain. I want to be able to analyze and understand complex systems. It's only logical to assume that twittering produces bird brains.

So by losing context and lacking coherence, meaning potentially gets lost. This is what I dislike most about Twitter. Tweets are potentially ambigious due to their briefness. Is the benefit of speed bigger than the loss of meaning? Just a few days ago the weekly (sic!) german language newspaper "Die Zeit" had a great article about a related issue, the demise of newspapers all over the world. Newspapers just can't compete with the internet, it's too fast. So what do they do? They desperately started to blog and podcast. And now they also twitter.

This is what I call fascism. You just have to twitter these days. Twitter is so new, we really know nothing about its consequences or even what it is good for. We twitter because everybody else does. It's about fear, if I don't jump on the Twitter wagon now I won't be able to catch up later. I wonder what's next. What's the sound of a Kolibri?

If you think I'm not doing Twitter justice, please help me. I would love to understand if there was another side to it that has escaped my attention. But for now, my advice is to subscribe to a newspaper today. It seems to be an anachronistic thing to do, but I'm really afraid to live in a world of meaningless hyperspeed news and wading through bird droppings. And if you think Twitter is not really applicable to the distribution of news, that's just what they say it's about.

Having said that, expect me to promote my very own Twitter channel here before the end of the year. I'm just a feeble hypocritic meme host myself.

Coincidentally I watched the sci-fi flick Johnny Mnemonic yesterday. If you manage to look past the wooden acting and straight-to-video charme, is has an interesting premise. In a nutshell, the plot takes place in 2021, where corporations have taken over and are in control of the whole information flow. Half of the earth's population is suffering from Nerve Attenuation Syndrome, a fictional, epilepsy-like disease, which is a result of overexposure to the radiation of technical devices. Johnny Mnemonic is a data courier, who has an implant which allows him to store any data in his brain and smuggle it for well-paying customers. In order to fulfil a contract he overloads his brain severely and desperately tries to get rid of the information he is carrying.

For me, it rang a bell. The volume of data we are dealing with seems to increase all the time. Getting information is trivial today, the challenge is filtering. The tools and user interfaces have a hard time living up to that challenge. Our default tool, the brain, is quite well-designed as it automatically discards useless information, we forget details, and only store what left the biggest impressions on us. Well, most brains manage, unless you happen to suffer from Hyperthymesia. People with this condition are unable to filter between more or less important pieces of information. I guess my mail client has Hyperthymesia too.

I'm not even talking about spam here. Spam is filtered quite well, although it is still annoying to some degree. I'm only talking about information I get from my peers, mailing lists and company mass mails. I have to make a conscious effort to arrange the incoming data. I created a sophisticated folder structure along with a set of filters. But I still have all the data. I have to make a decision everytime I want to delete a mail. Making decisions causes stress. What would it be like if you had to consciously delete a thought, a visual impression or a sound? Think about it.

There's not a lot I could do about the mail issue. First of all, I deleted 100,000 mails in a frenzy. I cancelled a lot of mailing lists, and only kept those I contribute to. Mozilla Thunderbird has a feature "delete messages more than n days old", which is interesting, but I'm afraid to use it. That sounds too much like Alzheimer to me. My only advice is to check mails a few times a day, in the morning, before and after lunch, and before leaving the office. I keep the mail client closed in between. I keep my inbox clean. There's nothing more satisfying than going home and leaving an empty inbox behind.

I prefer using forums over mailing lists. In a forum, you search for the information you want. You will get notified if people write about topics you have shown interest in. In a mailing list, you always get all the information (digests don't help). It's like having this pathetic friend that cannot stop talking, until your ears bleed.

If you have advice for me, if you know any great tools that would help me, let me know. I don't want to end up like Johnny Mnemonic. Only twelve years until 2021.

This is a trilogy of blog entries I have planned for the near future. It is about my perception of the web and how it relates to humans. This is the preamble.

I deal with the web a lot. I don't have to. But I do. Is it just what people do in the 21st century, or is there more to it? I'm not asking whether we would manage to live without it, but rather, are we capable of living with it? Or even worse, are we at all free not to use it? The web is a very attractive place for the human brain. It offers everything and demands nothing, it's huge, yet efficient. However, it's just a tool. A tool itself cannot be judged. It's the way people use it and by this shape the future I'm interested in.

I labelled this post "a memetic rat race". Some terminology first.

A meme is an entity, an information container with the distinct purpose to propagate and multiply. Like a virus. A meme is oblivious to what information it carries. It doesn't care. It just wants to spread. Think about World War II. Do you think people wanted a war where 50 million people die? No, the circumstances where just right for the fascism meme (and others) to spread. The meme succeeded short term, humans suffered long term. The meme is oblivious. This might be quite a low blow if you thought you had a free will. Bad luck. You are nothing but a meme host.

A rat race is the antithesis to sustainable pace. When you move at sustainable pace, you can keep that speed forever, theoretically. While sustainable pace ignores the context, the rat race is about competition. It's about winning, and wanting to win, whatever the cost. Taking a closer look, it's more about the illusion of winning. You seem to win, but lose in the long run.

In the memetic rat race, us humans are the rats. We are competing, and the goal is to process information as efficient as possible. The rat race is camouflaged as work, as communication, even as recreation. The web is the ever-evolving tool which enables us to accelerate in the memetic rat race. We get information at a faster rate, we get it in increasing volume. Do we want that? Do we need that? The web doesn't care about us, it's oblivious.

I'm aware that I'm just spreading memes as well. My memes are not better than other people's memes. But first, I think I happen to be connected to some unusual meme agoras, and second, somehow my brain produces weird mutations of the memes it is fed. I think that spreading these memes might be helpful to humans in the long run. I think by understanding the way memes operate, you can manipulate the system. The meta-meme.

In fact we are more than meme hosts. We have bodies and emotions, these need a sustainable pace in order to exist. They don't mix with the memetic rat race.

By the way, the blog entries that will form the trilogy are these

- How I deleted 100,000 e-mails
- Twitter fascism
- Heraclitus would have loved the web

Yesterday I sent a parcel to Finland. I decided to use the fairly new service Online Frankierung by DHL. Print the address label, pay online, and finally put the parcel in a box. No human interaction involved. But I was promised I saved 1 Euro (apparently I'm not hard to get). But the experience raised some questions.

First of all, I'm not sure if it's a good thing from a humanistic point of view, if technology is taking over the jobs of people. Aren't technological solutions always a step towards alienation from your environment? I'm not talking about myself, I would definitely go mad if I had a job at the post office (not unlike Charles Bukowski), but I'm sure others find it rewarding. But I usually find the personal contact in transactions like these comforting, rather than just talking to a machine.

There is also the probability of failure: If the service was not functional, it would give me stress. So the deal is save one Euro, but take a gamble, it's like not buying insurance. Speaking strictly from a technological point of view, especially as a Linux user, my hopes were not high. It was justified. After I had paid, a Java-applet created a PDF document for me, unfortunately without any data in it. No addresses, nothing. See for yourself.



In order to resolve issues like these, DHL offers a free chat service, which was unavailable. I had to call a hotline, and in the end talked to a human being, which was able to resolve the problem quickly, by sending the PDF document to me manually. So my stress level remained at a tolerable level, but I guess the phone conversation cost more than the Euro I was supposed to save. But a human had to save the day. What did I learn? Next time I will go back to the post office, only to stand in line for an hour, get mistreated by impatient staff and catch a cold. Maybe I didn't learn anything.

Another moral question that came along with buying the postage was the "go green" option. DHL charges 0,20 Euro for this, and promises a transport free of carbon emissions. There is some certification involved, but in the end I have to trust DHL. Again, I bought it. The funny thing is, you can actually buy "go green" stickers. Is it only me, or is that somehow stupid, manufacturing stickers in order to save the environment?

Please help me resolve these moral issues. Or I will have to contact the omniscient Dr. Dr. Erlinger?

In the past months I have been rather quiet, the reason is that I have dealt intensely with Scrum, an agile management framework. I have been a follower of agile practices in software development, for example XP, and Scrum extends these practices to a larger context. This book is a good introduction to Scrum, as it is written by some of the creators of Scrum, and therefore an original, one of the first to deal with the subject, and furthermore it is very concise, it only weighs about 150 pages.



Scrum has worked extremely well in my (still limited) experience. The most promising aspect is, that people seem to love it. That's one of Scrum's central aspects, it puts people first, just like the Agile Manifesto demands, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools". With a very small set of strict rules, it takes a lot of the burden of decision making off people and lets them focus on their work.

Wikipedia has a great article on Scrum, explaining it in much greater detail than I could in a blog post. But the following illustration sums it up quite nicely I think.



What I want to do is to give you a few more interesting stops for your Scrum journey.

First of all, a good companion to the book by Schwaber and Beedle is "Scrum and XP from the Trenches" by Henrik Kniberg. The author shares his experience with introducing Scrum at his company of about 40 people. He describes his solutions to the problems he faced, which I found useful in the first sprints I took part. Also a very light weight book, good content but an easy read. Kniberg's company also sells Planning Poker decks at reasonable prices.

There are some excellent lectures on YouTube's GoogleTechTalks channel, like "Scrum Et Al." by Ken Schwaber, or "Self-Organization: The Secret Sauce for Improving your Scrum team" by Scrum co-creator Jeff Sutherland. I find the latter one even more impressive as Sutherland portraits what can be achieved with Scrum if you manage to get a team into hyper-productive state.

At Jeff Sutherland's blog you will also find the Nokia Test, developed by Bas Vodde at said company in 2005 in order to measure how true the implementation of Scrum was to the original concept. You have a set of nine questions, and after a product cycle has completed, each team member is supposed to answer this catalog. From the answers you can compute a number, which indicates the degree to which you have stuck to Scrum. I found this test very useful in a Sprint retrospective I led.

The books by Mike Cohn might also be worth a mention, despite the fact that I haven't read them. I have only taken a glance at "Agile Estimating and Planning", which seems to take a more academic approach, but also his other two books seem to be interesting, "User Stories Applied" and "Succeeding with Agile". His blog is also always worth to subscribe to.

Last but not least, I want to mention the mailing list scrumdevelopment at Yahoo, which is a good reality check as you can read about the challenges people face when introducing Scrum to their environments.

The intriguing premise of The Fifth Discipline is, that a companies' only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than its competitors. Senge names companies who follow this approach "Learning organizations". He makes it clear that you can never actually be a Learning Organization, as it is a neverending process, more a state of mind. Senge identifies five disciplines that help us build the Learning Organization: "Personal mastery", "Mental models", "Building shared vision", "Team learning", and "Systems thinking".



For me, "Personal mastery" is more or less what Stephen Covey describes in his book "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", you can read my previous blog entry about it. I liked the way Senge says people with a high level of personal mastery approach their life like an artist approaches a work of art. They have intrinsic motivation and are deeply committed to what they do.

"Mental models" are the way we view the world. There is no truth, only our perception of the world. We need to let go of the assumption that what we see is "the truth". Only when we are aware of this we will be able to explore other people's opinions without prejudice. (Thanks to Seven for her toughts on truth).


"Building shared vision" is about forming a collective vision from personal visions. Only a vision has the power to give us long term motivation, it is a picture of a future we seek to create. The challenge is not to dictate a vision, as this will at best lead to compliance. What you want are truly committed people, who truly embrace the shared vision, as it if was their own.

In order to understand "Team learning", you need to be aware of the difference between "dialogue" and "discussion": Dialogue is about exploring a topic, and opening up. You let go of you own mental models, and enter a process of genuine "thinking together". Through dialogue you will be able to see things you would never have seen on your own. In contrast, discussion is a process of decision making, it's a process of weighing arguments, with one argument being the winner. Dialogue is about opening up, discussion about narrowing down. You need to know when to go to dialogue mode, and when to return to discussion mode.

Continuining with "Systems thinking", Senge says that our world view today is fragmented: We are a society that produces specialists, who are used to address a tiny segment of a bigger system they don't have to understand. In computer science we call that paradigma divide-and-conquer. But reassembling the fragments into a whole is a complex process, so we either stop trying or end up with a distorted "big picture". We see the world as a chain of events, not as a complex system that produces these events. So we often find ourselves solving problems by removing the symptoms, without trying to see the system's mechanism that produces these problems.

"Systems thinking" is the fifth discipline, giving the book its title. it incorporates all other disciplines. "Building shared vision" fosters thinking long-term. An understanding of "mental models" helps us to to be willing to see the system, while "team learning" actually helps us to see the system. "Personal mastery" helps us to reflect and see us as part of the system.

After all, a Learning Organization is not something abstract or remote: humans are really learning machines, learning gives us pleasure, it lies in our nature to learn. The concept of a Learning Organization helps us to model an organization after the people who form it, and not vice versa.

Peter M. Senge also wrote the foreword to the book "Sustainability by design", which I reviewed earlier this year. Make sure to get the revised edition from 2006. It contains a lot of real world examples of organizations that applied the techniques mentioned in this book. You can buy a copy here, or lend my copy, just ask.

In addition to the chicken or egg causality dilemma, which deals with whether the chicken or egg came first, an aware consumer also has to think about where the eggs come from, no matter if they came first.

Fortunately, since January 2005, all eggs sold within the European Union have a mandatory label, which helps to identify where they come from. There is also a search engine, which also displays the origin on a Google Map.

Apart from the origin, the label also shows how the hens were held. As hens are no longer allowed to be kept in cages since 2009, there are three categories left: Organic keeping, Free range keeping and Barn keeping. As these categorizations are quite soft, and some concern has been raised on free-range eggs, I think I have to go with eggs from organic kept hens from now on.

Furthermore, chickens kept in barns will not help us to answer the why did the chicken cross the road question. How should they know? But beware, if you don't look out for your livestock, you will end up with your chicken ticketed.

Today I had some free time on my hands, and created a useless mash-up. The idea is to display the filming locations of a certain movie on a map. Here's what you have to do:

- copy this link into your bookmarks toolbar
- visit the IMDb and navigate to a movie, for example "Into the Wild"
- click the link in the bookmarks toolbar

You are then being redirected to a website that displays a map like this



The PHP parser gets the location names from IMDb, sends these names as query strings to the Yahoo! Geocoding API, which the returns coordinates the are being displayed by OpenLayers. It's needs some fine-tuning, but you get the idea

And finally, the credits: This mash-up uses Openlayers, the Yahoo! Geocoding API, jQuery, jQuery Progression, jQuery BlockUI and OpenStreetMap data.

After watching the film "Home" yesterday, took a quick glance at goodplanet.org, which is the site of the environmental non-profit organisation of Yann-Arthus Bertrand, the director of the film. One section of this websizte is headlined "Act for the planet", which among other topics offers yet another carbon footprint calculator, which does not require a detailled input. After a few minutes I found a calculator of the Umweltbundesamt. Here I'll share the results for my household (three persons) with you.

Public consumption includes all emission for which the state is responsible. These emissions are divided by the number of inhabitants. Hmm, nothing we can do about these 3,72 tons for now, apart from voting green.

Private consumption includes shopping habits and criteria, and hotel overnight stays. I guess I'm not overly consumptive, and fortunately spend little time in hotels. Nevertheless, the calculator adds another 4,57 tons to our carbon footprint.

Fortunately I can get to work on foot, so the public transport segment does only add 0,21 tons. We don't have a car or motorcycle either, so 0 tons in private transport.

The next segment, traveling by plane, really breaks our neck. My wife is from Indonesia, so a round trip results in a whopping 21,79 tons (!) for the three of us. We only travel every two years at most, so I'll add half of that, 10,9 tons. My business trip to the OSGeo hacking event in Bolsena, Italy, adds another 0,69 tons. All in all, 11,59 tons.

Foodwise, our behaviour is quite average. We try to buy seasonal and regional products, avoid deep-freeze stuff, but also buy imported asian food. I guess that somehow levels out. Another 4,85 tons.

For the last two years we have used electricity from renewable ressources (123ökostrom 360). We also seem to use little electricity, I checked the last bill and it lists 1721 kWh. Nevertheless, the calculator adds 0,07 tons.

Our heating habits also seem reasonable, as our apartment is not really big. We have used 5242 kWh last year. However, we could switch to Bonn NaturGas next year to improve. 1,13 tons.

In the end, this sums up to 26,13 tons, which equals roughly 8,7 tons per person. Compared to the average 11 tons a person from Germany is responsible for, this is a good number, but if you keep in mind that about two tons per person would be called sustainable, it's far too much. I think we could half our emissions from 8,7 tons to about 4,4 tons. If even well-educated people like us don't manage this, then good night, planet. So here's what we as a familiy will do

- be more aware when buying food, especially cut down on meat and imports (save 0,16 tons).
- use gas from renewable ressources (saves 0,38 tons)
- compensate all the emissions from airplane travel by donating to an organization like atmosfair (saves 3,8 tons).

I'll let you know how that works out. Please feel free to share your carbon footprint or help us in lowering ours.